Euro Auto Festival 2012

South Carolina hosts an impressive gathering of European cars

Feature Article from Hemmings Sports & Exotic Car

You can't get much more competitive than the automotive business, but for one weekend each fall, one company lets its guard down and invites everyone to come out and play on its turf.

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Calling a truce for a couple of days, BMW hosts the annual Euro Auto Festival at its Greer, South Carolina, assembly plant. This past October 19 to 21, nearly 400 European cars of all stripes and makes converged on the Greenville and Spartanburg area to celebrate European cars. Along with a driving tour, technical sessions and plenty of social gatherings, the main event for the 17th edition of the Euro Auto Festival was the Saturday car show, held on the lawn surrounding the Zentrum, BMW's on-site museum and visitor's center. With the featured marque being Mercedes-Benz, BMW surely acted the gracious host.
The Euro, as it is known colloquially to the attendees, who come from all over the Southeast, offers awards in more than 50 classes with a Crowd Pleaser for each marque. Each entrant gets a ballot and awards are handed out based on those votes. The top Mercedes-Benz was Fred and Cathy Hayes's 1955 300 SL Gullwing. The Best of the Best award went to Gary Arrowood for his spectacularly well restored 1964 Aston Martin DB5 (you'll be seeing a feature on this car in a future issue of this magazine). Don and Darby Wathne went home with the People's Choice award for their 1914 Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost, which had a lot more brass than silver!
The show was founded by the Foothills British Car Club of South Carolina; today, many other clubs step up to help out in addition to helping fill the show field. The all-volunteer operation has been successfully led by Barry Harms in recent years, but Barry is handing the reins over to John Budinich for 2013. An active member of both the Porsche and BMW clubs, John is also known to locals as the organizer of the Upstate Cars & Coffee gatherings held in Greenville, South Carolina.
For this year's show, coming once again on the third Saturday of October, Ferrari--and their racing heritage--will be the featured marque. You can find more information at www.euroautofestival.com.
BMW's Southern Presence
As thousands of people gathered to admire the hundreds of cars at the Euro Auto Fest, BMW's manufacturing operations on the site continued, as they do, multiple shifts seven days a week, turning out close to a thousand cars a day as the only place in the world where BMW produces X3, X5 and X6 sport utility vehicles. Now quite common, a foreign carmaker in the Southeast was a pretty novel idea when BMW broke ground on their plant in 1992. BMW's factory has grown in two decades to more than 4,000,000 square feet and 7,000 employees. The facility is so big that it has its own police and fire departments.
Along the way BMW has become the largest exporter of vehicles from the U.S. Some 70 percent of 2012 production of approximately 300,000 vehicles was destined for other markets. Across the highway from the factory, BMW also operates the BMW Performance Center, a driver training facility where you can learn to operate a BMW at speed in a controlled environment from expert instructors with years of racing experience.
Customers who order any new BMW (as opposed to buying one off the lot) can take delivery at the Performance Center, which not only gives them the VIP treatment when taking delivery, but also on-track instruction from BMW. The cost, other than getting your keister to South Carolina, is free. BMW, a company keenly aware of its storied history, also keeps a collection of classic BMWs in South Carolina, some on display and some not, three of which they rolled out for us to photograph at the Performance Center. They gave us the pleasure of returning the M1 to the garage area, and it took us only three laps to get back.

This article originally appeared in the March, 2013 issue of Hemmings Sports & Exotic Car.